Harry Marks wrote: I don't think philosophy is a good way to characterize early Christianity

Hello Harry, you have an unerring knack of making comments that focus directly on themes that are central to my interests. So I will look at each sentence here in turn.

The fact is, scholars do not yet know how to characterise early Christianity in a historically accurate and persuasive way. Perhaps more than any other period in history, the gospel stories were subjected to revision, censorship, distortion, exaggeration and suppression, all motivated by the desire to support political use of the historical claims of the Gospels as a central myth in support of stability and security for empire. So the status of philosophy in this melting pot is very unclear. I think it had a far bigger role than you imply.

My opinion is that the Gospels are entirely fictional, and that the real hidden core of early Christianity is a Gnostic effort to apply Plato’s philosophy, through the lens of Jewish, Egyptian and Babylonian myths to obtain popular mythological resonance. If that hypothesis proves coherent and predictive, then philosophy is a good way to characterise early Christianity before it was corrupted by literalist politics.

For example, we can start to analyse the meaning of widely supported lost heresies such as Docetism, the belief that Jesus only seemed to be a real person, as pointing to a deeper philosophical framework for early Christianity, whose details have been lost.

Harry Marks wrote: Two factors are strong marks of distinction for the (actually very diverse) early movement: koinonia love feasts, linked strongly to the eucharist, and "the Holy Spirit" including, in some cases, glossolalia.

Or so the extant texts suggest. To illustrate one conundrum from your reading, the alleged First Century text the epistle of Clement to the Corinthians refers to the church of Corinth as “ancient”. That is not compatible with the general view that Christian churches were established in response to the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, indicating that the entire “Jesus of Nazareth” trope from Saint Mark is purely fictional. That is just one small example that comes to mind of why it is important to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to claims about early Christian sociology. The secret mystery traditions were not recorded and are largely lost, except in their fugitive traces and in the ritual frameworks you mention.

Harry Marks wrote: Paul's "spirit vs. flesh" contrast was not very philosophical at all, though it was no doubt influenced by Stoicism and Platonism common across the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.

The philosophy behind Paul got dumbed down for popular consumption, concealing the real Gnostic mystery secret society wisdom agenda of the Epistles, according to Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton.

Harry Marks wrote: Some non-dualism is visible in the teachings of Jesus, but I rather think those were matters of direct insight rather than philosophy.

It would be good to go through the Bible to examine it in terms of this heuristic of the tension between monist and dualist theology, seeing monism as the Buddhist and Greek idea that all is one, and dualism as the idea that earth and heaven are ultimately separate.

For example, when Jesus says “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) he points to the ultimate unity of all things, indicating that God is intimately connected to the world. Similarly, the concept of atonement contains a tension between a Buddhist philosophy of becoming “at one” and the conventional dualistic idea of atonement as Jesus saving by blood sacrifice. Basic concepts such as grace, love and blessing reflect a mystical sense of communion and oneness. The dualist idea of God as wholly transcendent was more a political stratagem to subordinate and distort religion beneath the state than a coherent logical system.

Harry Marks wrote: I think Jesus, like St. Francis and many others, just "saw" that the internal antagonism over righteousness and purity was obscuring the light of mercy and caring.

As in economics, many obviously intuitive assumptions prove dubious when subjected to detailed scrutiny. What you call “the light of mercy and caring” is used by the political left to advocate open borders and high welfare expenditure, although these policies can have negative consequences. People on both left and right of politics similarly “Just See” that all their opinions are correct. But just because somebody claims their beliefs are obviously true does not make it so.

Harry Marks wrote: relating to its "usefulness" imposes the deepest dualism of all, which is the distinction between subject and object.

I don’t agree that distinction between subject and object is the deepest dualism. Personal identity involves a sense of self as subject, as distinct from the rest of the universe perceived as object. It is still possible to retain a sense of the unity of subject and object, in that all persons are part of the world, meaning that this distinction does not make self and world ontologically different in the way the traditional dualisms of supernatural versus natural do.

Harry Marks wrote: I also think you have usefully touched on the inherent dualism in supernatural notions, since they generally claim that something "out there" will do the spirit's work "in here."

The inherent dualism is the idea that God in heaven has supernatural qualities and attributes that cannot in principle be detected or understood by natural methods, but require spiritual revelation. The inherently fallacious nature of arguments from revelation is seen from Hume’s observation that claims of the actual occurrence of miracles are more likely to reflect error or deception than breaking the laws of physics through divine intervention. These logical problems explain why consistency and coherence are important scientific principles which make dualism dubious.

Harry Marks wrote:
I would be hard pressed to think of planetary survival without some sort of emergent resolve to put caring first.

Yes. My thinking on this topic emerges from the relation between philosophy and religion articulated by Martin Heidegger, in his existential axiom that care is the meaning of being. Planetary survival requires a paradigm shift to see existence as fundamentally relational, abandoning the imperial myth that human existence is constituted as isolated individuals. Caring means we are all intrinsically connected.

Harry Marks wrote: Apocalypse and transformation is one possible track for that, but I don't think it is the only one available, or even the one with the strongest connection to the spiritual truths in the religious outlook.

Well then we disagree. My view is that global warming is the primary apocalyptic problem driving the risk of human extinction and collapse, the symptom of a failure of care. Global warming can only be solved by seeing the science within the framework of a cultural analysis as apocalypse.

The Biblical framework of apocalypse and transformation opens the question of what it would mean to have Jesus Christ as king of the world. That is a big planetary problem of the validity of a cosmology of fall and redemption, enframing the smaller problems that faith routinely addresses at personal and social levels.

Harry Marks wrote: We have been through one "apocalypse and transformation" on the environment,

No, we have not been through an apocalypse. Describing history to date as apocalyptic is flippant, ignoring the seriousness of the risks of collapse and extinction induced by the current trajectory of human culture.

Harry Marks wrote: and it simply required that we give up on notions of market perfection in which anything one did for commercial reasons was ipso facto innocent.

Sorry your comment is far too cryptic. What do you mean?

Harry Marks wrote: Getting past the emotional solipsism of "what's good for my treasury is good for society" is only the very lowest stratum of the call of God.

I like your phrase “emotional solipsism”. It means the sentiment that only our selfish concerns matter, and we are immune to any sympathy for others. However, you seem to imply a critique of those who make concern about government debt a primary moral issue. I don’t agree that such concern can be sheeted just to the modern myth of the individual that gives rise to emotional solipsism, even though they are associated as attributes of capitalist ideology.

Harry Marks wrote: To me vocation is a deep and intrinsically resonant window onto many other Christian concepts: salvation, the Kingdom, living by the Spirit, shalom, the body of Christ, the true vine, sanctification, and more.

Yes, and this resonance is reflected in the ministry theme of ‘vitality of call’. Only with a living sense of calling does faith acquire the meaning and purpose and direction expressed in the other concepts you mention.

Harry Marks wrote: It is good to feel a part of a great salvation process: "thy Kingdom come." But it is more tangible and vivid to be connected to specific work that connects us in turn to the process of transforming the world.

“Tangible and vivid” does not equate to important. An old tradition sees the task of faith as preparing the way of the Lord. Yet then we confront the Mary-Martha dilemma, of whether the most important portion is understanding high concepts or performing works of service.

The high idea that we are saved by grace through faith brings the notion that faith inspires mercy, whereas works performed without at least an implicit faith framework lack salvific potency.

But the big problem for apocalyptic thinking is that we are genuinely on a trajectory to catastrophe, and need a conversation about religion to change that dangerous direction of the world embodied in the indifference to climate change. We definitely do need discussion about high concepts rather than irrelevant token works such as changing our light bulbs.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: I don't think philosophy is a good way to characterize early Christianity

The fact is, scholars do not yet know how to characterise early Christianity in a historically accurate and persuasive way. Perhaps more than any other period in history, the gospel stories were subjected to revision, censorship, distortion, exaggeration and suppression, all motivated by the desire to support political use of the historical claims of the Gospels as a central myth in support of stability and security for empire.

Well, it is true that the record was censored, but that does not provide unlimited license to infer any plausible interpretation. We may never know, but we can try to get as clear a picture as possible.

Robert Tulip wrote:So the status of philosophy in this melting pot is very unclear. I think it had a far bigger role than you imply.
My opinion is that the Gospels are entirely fictional, and that the real hidden core of early Christianity is a Gnostic effort to apply Plato’s philosophy, through the lens of Jewish, Egyptian and Babylonian myths to obtain popular mythological resonance. If that hypothesis proves coherent and predictive, then philosophy is a good way to characterise early Christianity before it was corrupted by literalist politics.

As you may recall, I have read a bit of Carrier's work and am not much impressed. If the hypothesis "proves coherent and predictive", fine. So far, more careful and less speculative work has had more coherent and predictive things to say, in my view, and if anything, they point away from the mythicist hypothesis.

For instance, I am currently reading "Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle" by Pamela Eisenbaum, and it does a super job of pulling together research on Paul in his cultural context, done over the last 20 years. Not only does it recognize that Paul's polemics against "works of the Law" was addressed specifically to Gentile Christians, and explain why this made sense, but it also pins down the connection between Paul's theme of the Resurrection and his mission to the Gentiles (Jesus' resurrection, Paul believed, was the opening and the signal of the End Times, which required the in-gathering of the nations to believe in the One God). It makes many otherwise obscure passages in Paul suddenly eminently sensible.

And the cultural context of the time did not preach a mythical Resurrection, like Osiris, but a literal one. Maybe there was a later coverup, but it is more economical, more Occam-ish, to recognize that people believed the dead were going to get out of their graves and walk around, as Matthew portrayed matters in his story of the crucifixion, and thus the default about Jesus was that he was a living guy, crucified, who then (Paul believed) got up and walked around.

The supposedly inexplicable omission by Paul of the details of Jesus' biography makes much more sense when you recognize that he saw Jesus' death and resurrection as a "mechanism" for atonement and thus reconciliation for Gentiles, providing a substitute for the relationship that Torah created for the Jews. Thus, for his mission, the "other stuff" of the Gospels was not very important, and in particular the arguments that he fulfilled Messianic scriptures, important to the Synoptic Gospels, were largely irrelevant to Paul's audiences.

Robert Tulip wrote:For example, we can start to analyse the meaning of widely supported lost heresies such as Docetism, the belief that Jesus only seemed to be a real person, as pointing to a deeper philosophical framework for early Christianity, whose details have been lost.

All too conveniently lost, if you ask me. Maybe notions like Docetism were at the core of early Christianity, but it makes just as much sense to see them as variants that emerged as visionary individuals put their spin on the message. After all, we have a wide variety of such variants, heavily featuring some with Jesus as all human with no divine nature at all, and the economical explanation is that, as with Buddhism in Asia, variants will happen.

Robert Tulip wrote:Or so the extant texts suggest.

One quickly tires of arguments based on censorship. It may be that some process eliminated "the truth" from the evidence, as we have evidence of in the redaction of sources in the OT. It does seem clear that there was suppression of the Gnostic texts, but we know this because at least one community did not wish to see them eliminated from the record, and buried manuscripts at Nag Hammadi. At least one of those has Jesus performing miracles as a child, which suggests some reason other than evidence of mythicism for their suppression.

Robert Tulip wrote:To illustrate one conundrum from your reading, the alleged First Century text the epistle of Clement to the Corinthians refers to the church of Corinth as “ancient”. That is not compatible with the general view that Christian churches were established in response to the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth,

There is discussion, in Acts 18 and 19, about how worshipers in Ephesus had only heard of "the baptism of John". There was evidently a community that later came to identify with Christianity but was in a proto-Christian state before Paul came. It is plausible to believe the same is true of Corinth, and that its status as "ancient" refers more to the length of time Jews had been worshiping together there than to some mysterious, hidden philosophical roots of Christian thought.

Robert Tulip wrote:it is important to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to claims about early Christian sociology. The secret mystery traditions were not recorded and are largely lost, except in their fugitive traces and in the ritual frameworks you mention.

Plausible, but not, in my view, economical. A hermeneutic of suspicion is a good idea, I just also apply it to other narratives about what happened.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: Paul's "spirit vs. flesh" contrast was not very philosophical at all, though it was no doubt influenced by Stoicism and Platonism common across the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.

The philosophy behind Paul got dumbed down for popular consumption, concealing the real Gnostic mystery secret society wisdom agenda of the Epistles, according to Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton.

I have only read a couple of Pagels' early books for popular consumption, so I am unfamiliar with that argument. But while I find it plausible (and even helpful in explaining some of the weird stuff) that Paul had a background in mystery religions (some have observed that Tarsus was a center of Mithraism and his father was a Roman, for example) that doesn't mean his main messages are just dumbed down from esoteric philosophical insights.

In some of Paul's "practical" passages he shows definite skill in both parsing logic and sorting out real-world implications. For all of his soaring rhetoric and occasional mystical experiences, he was a guy with his feet on the ground. For that reason it makes much more sense to me to argue that his interpretations were influenced by mystery religion thought patterns than that he saw them as "the true truth" and lived a lifelong pattern of inventing quasi-Jewish theology to instantiate them.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: Some non-dualism is visible in the teachings of Jesus, but I rather think those were matters of direct insight rather than philosophy.

the concept of atonement contains a tension between a Buddhist philosophy of becoming “at one” and the conventional dualistic idea of atonement as Jesus saving by blood sacrifice. Basic concepts such as grace, love and blessing reflect a mystical sense of communion and oneness. The dualist idea of God as wholly transcendent was more a political stratagem to subordinate and distort religion beneath the state than a coherent logical system.

None of the canonical Jewish texts of the Tanakh were meant to be a "coherent logical system." Philo of Alexandria made such an effort, but rabbinical Judaism is much more about "see, you can look at it this way," than about "here's the answer, go memorize it."

With the entry of the Holy Spirit into the picture, referring back to ecstatic practices of early prophets, Christians had an experiential point of reference that was dramatically different from the transcendence perspective. By the time of John's gospel the ideas surrounding incarnation were coming to replace the original dominant themes of apocalyptic overturning. It's a subtle shift, (with shades of Atman replacing Brahman, but I think this is "convergent evolution" in which patterns which present themselves to virtually any visionary are going to show up to all of them) but in both cases the vision is bottom up and experiential rather than top down like later patristic theology.

I honestly don't think "payment" for sins was the original understanding of "my blood, shed for you". The record looks much more to me like motivated "overturners" struggling to connect to the Messiah prophecies, and the monotheistic tradition in general, than like a secret mystery teaching bursting out into an open social process.

Robert Tulip wrote:What you call “the light of mercy and caring” is used by the political left to advocate open borders and high welfare expenditure, although these policies can have negative consequences. People on both left and right of politics similarly “Just See” that all their opinions are correct. But just because somebody claims their beliefs are obviously true does not make it so.

Well, that's a good reason to see the teachings of Christianity as available insight rather than as settled truth. Given the choice between living without love and living without affluence, I would take living without affluence. And I think there is abundant evidence that the hard-edged practicality people adopt to protect themselves against the light of mercy and caring turns easily into a carapace that makes both self and nearby others miserable. The Midas Touch. Would I want to be Weinstein? Not on your life. Would I trade the comforts of a life in the Trump family for the misery of having to suck up to the Donald all the time? Not on your life.

Getting the balance right between the many competing principles in life is a spiritual problem. For me, the ultimate principle in the non-dualist perspective is not, "All is One" but "You can't close yourself off any of these issues." It's existentialism: there is no substitute for authenticity.

Once again I am going to opt for a two-part response. I do enjoy the careful reading, as well as the thinking and explaining, even if it sometimes seems like ships crossing in the night on different trajectories. But I need to take a break and I am afraid of losing the part I have written.

If I can throw in two cents on the part of the discussion on Elaine Pagels, in The Gnostic Paul she isn't focussing on Paul's debt to gnosticism but rather on how gnostics read Paul. This relationship of Paul to gnosticism would seem I believe to be more historically likely. Doesn't scholarship support the view that gnosticism flourished well after Paul's time?

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: relating to its "usefulness" imposes the deepest dualism of all, which is the distinction between subject and object.

I don’t agree that distinction between subject and object is the deepest dualism. Personal identity involves a sense of self as subject, as distinct from the rest of the universe perceived as object. It is still possible to retain a sense of the unity of subject and object, in that all persons are part of the world, meaning that this distinction does not make self and world ontologically different in the way the traditional dualisms of supernatural versus natural do.

I don't think it is possible to process categories of ontology without imposing the subject/object split. Sages explaining non-dualist perspectives usually report that true enlightenment is experienced as a melting away of that split, so that the contemplative one experiences life, the universe and everything as part of the self, and not just vice-versa. Not having experienced this, I find I can best make sense of it with the perspective of universal consciousness, that our own consciousness is part of some larger awareness, and that we can access that awareness by having "self" be constituted not by its differences from "the outside" but by its independence from the limitations of the differentiated "small" self.

You tend to resist having words change their meaning, so I suspect a claim that self is not "what you thought self was" is inherently repugnant to you. Yet such propositions are essential to the Eastern tradition in which the world is illusion and enlightenment requires seeing literally everything differently. The tradition of contemplative Christianity is not so invested in notions of illusion, but its insights consistently point toward seeing "self" as inclusive of the welfare of others.

Once again, let me suggest that this be seen as insight on offer, rather than as the truth which therefore becomes commandment. There is no compulsion in love. The strictures of justice are much more a matter of obligation, but justice can be interpreted differently in light of different "partial goods" on the way to "perfect shalom". But love is, well, on offer.

The question naturally arises to the small self, "on offer for what? Why should I be interested?" The answer is, for the good, but this is not the Good of obligation, the thing we are supposed to want, but rather the harmony of all things toward which the soul inclines itself naturally, when it is seeking what makes life meaningful at all. And as long as we insist on our self being separated from that harmony, it will be.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: I also think you have usefully touched on the inherent dualism in supernatural notions, since they generally claim that something "out there" will do the spirit's work "in here."

The inherent dualism is the idea that God in heaven has supernatural qualities and attributes that cannot in principle be detected or understood by natural methods, but require spiritual revelation. The inherently fallacious nature of arguments from revelation is seen from Hume’s observation that claims of the actual occurrence of miracles are more likely to reflect error or deception than breaking the laws of physics through divine intervention. These logical problems explain why consistency and coherence are important scientific principles which make dualism dubious.

Well, I think you have managed to talk yourself into a viewpoint in which dualism rests on projection, so that only "false" distinctions (by the light of objective methods) count as dualism. While I agree that arguments from revelation for some kind of supernatural authority are specious, that does not negate revelation as a source of insight.

In fact I would maintain that the fundamental problem with revelations about the supernatural is not their lack of scientific verifiability, but rather their distortion of the subject/object unity in the I/Thou encounter. As long as someone is looking for meaning "out there," in some obligation or other principle that is objectively "the real" meaning, it will not be real meaning.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: I would be hard pressed to think of planetary survival without some sort of emergent resolve to put caring first.

Yes. My thinking on this topic emerges from the relation between philosophy and religion articulated by Martin Heidegger, in his existential axiom that care is the meaning of being. Planetary survival requires a paradigm shift to see existence as fundamentally relational, abandoning the imperial myth that human existence is constituted as isolated individuals. Caring means we are all intrinsically connected.

That's what I have been trying to say. I suspect you are seeing it through a lens that planetary warming gives us, but what you are seeing is still the core insight of non-dualism. I might just as well argue that the possibility of nuclear war also means we are intrinsically connected in a way we were not before, but the primacy of caring to meaning makes that connection deeper and more fundamental to a meaningful life than recognizing we are all in the same lifeboat.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: We have been through one "apocalypse and transformation" on the environment,

No, we have not been through an apocalypse. Describing history to date as apocalyptic is flippant, ignoring the seriousness of the risks of collapse and extinction induced by the current trajectory of human culture.

Look, we could have strangled civilization long before climate change gets us, if we had not confronted the pollution buildup that was being created by the Industrial Age. Apocalypse just means revelation, and I have seen it with my own eyes. Not only the brown haze of Los Angeles, in which one could not go to the public pool without, in a half hour or so, being short of breath simply from being outside. (The same exposure routinely hospitalized my best friend, who was asthmatic). One day on a cross-country trip, I fell asleep in Ohio and woke up to see Hell out my window. There were fires at the top of smokestacks, and the red glow was lighting up the smoke belching out of them, and the whole landscape looked dirty and grey, with the sun struggling to penetrate the haze. Before long I realized it was not Hell but Pittsburgh (although since then people I told about it said that, yes, Pittsburgh was Hell) at the height of the wartime expansion: 1969. I don't have any trouble imagining the air of Delhi or Beijing today, because I saw it before the government got its act together and did something about it. That was "transformation."

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: and it simply required that we give up on notions of market perfection in which anything one did for commercial reasons was ipso facto innocent.

Sorry your comment is far too cryptic. What do you mean?

Sorry, that was just colorful language for "giving up the assumption that markets always allocate resources efficiently." The ideology of the invisible hand refuses to acknowledge externalities and the need for intervention to address them. I don't so refuse.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: Getting past the emotional solipsism of "what's good for my treasury is good for society" is only the very lowest stratum of the call of God.

I like your phrase “emotional solipsism”. It means the sentiment that only our selfish concerns matter, and we are immune to any sympathy for others. However, you seem to imply a critique of those who make concern about government debt a primary moral issue. I don’t agree that such concern can be sheeted just to the modern myth of the individual that gives rise to emotional solipsism, even though they are associated as attributes of capitalist ideology.

So what is wrong with government borrowing from its people to invest for the public good? I do not see any moral issue in government debt per se. If it isn't really for the public good, that could be a moral issue. If you owe it to others, that could be a practical issue. But the idea that there is something immoral about passing debt on to one's progeny, if the debt was used to also create something good that is also being passed on, is opaque to me. I can't see anything meaningful in it.

Robert Tulip wrote: this resonance is reflected in the ministry theme of ‘vitality of call’. Only with a living sense of calling does faith acquire the meaning and purpose and direction expressed in the other concepts you mention.

“Tangible and vivid” does not equate to important.

Not automatically. But vitality of call is closely involved with tangible and vivid experience of higher purpose. I believe spiritual matters are not abstract and philosophical but electric and energizing. The intellectualism of the church in the Enlightenment did serious damage to the pietism and other authentic spirituality that was abroad among the people before that. It quenched the spirit, as Paul would have said.

Robert Tulip wrote:An old tradition sees the task of faith as preparing the way of the Lord. Yet then we confront the Mary-Martha dilemma, of whether the most important portion is understanding high concepts or performing works of service.

The high idea that we are saved by grace through faith brings the notion that faith inspires mercy, whereas works performed without at least an implicit faith framework lack salvific potency.

Modern scholarship sees the idea of "faith" through the Greek term that Paul used. That term can best be translated as "trust" or, depending on the context, "faithfulness." A faith framework in the sense of a belief system is made for life, not life for a belief system.

As for Mary and Martha, another old tradition sees different gifts for different members. All the gifts are given for others. It is easy to see the "for others" in the Marthas, who toil away to see that the work goes forward. But those who sit at the feet of the Master need to see that it is "for others", and if they cannot deliver the insights to other seekers, they need to study harder.

Robert Tulip wrote:But the big problem for apocalyptic thinking is that we are genuinely on a trajectory to catastrophe, and need a conversation about religion to change that dangerous direction of the world embodied in the indifference to climate change. We definitely do need discussion about high concepts rather than irrelevant token works such as changing our light bulbs.

Well, given that a person like yourself, actually doing something about the climate issue, is simultaneously denying the role of markets in balancing external costs against benefits, apparently just because externalities by definition require public recognition and charging for those costs, I would say yes, we need some discussion about high concepts.

But don't worry. All will be revealed.

Harry Marks wrote:it is true that the record was censored, but that does not provide unlimited license to infer any plausible interpretation.

All plausible interpretations should be compared to assess which are most persuasive, elegant, compelling, coherent, consistent and parsimonious. That is the scientific method. Science has not been widely accepted in Biblical studies due to the aggressive bullying attitude of conventional faith, which until comparatively recently was backed up by the swords and faggots of Christendom to persecute all perceived heresy.

Scholarship in areas of history of interest to Christianity is severely tilted still in favour of faith-based apologetic beliefs. Many people of good will have simply never been exposed to good scholarship about Christian origins due to this atmosphere of intimidation.

Harry Marks wrote: We may never know, but we can try to get as clear a picture as possible.

Yes, and that is only possible if we insist on a conversation between theology and philosophy, so the high values of evidence and logic can be applied to problems traditionally approached only through the lens of faith. My view is this “clear picture” that you mention, once a compelling explanation emerges that properly accounts for all available information, will turn out to prove that near-universal assumptions, such as the historical existence of Jesus Christ, are entirely fictional in origin.

Harry Marks wrote:I have read a bit of Carrier's work and am not much impressed.

I probably share some of your critique of Carrier, such as of his extreme reductive approach to the meaning of faith. Most of the mythicist community, including Carrier, take the view that proving Jesus was faked will undermine Christianity, whereas I see that revelation as the only feasible and integral basis for renewal and reformation of Christian faith. So I have a basic difference of goal from Carrier, while respecting his scholarship.

Nothing better illustrates the total depravity of human psychology, the first point of Calvin’s Tulip theology, than how the Big Lie that the Gospels are history evolved into universal assent for a thousand years while its real symbolic meaning remained hidden for corrupt political reasons.

Harry Marks wrote:more careful and less speculative work … point away from the mythicist hypothesis.

Unfortunately, the historicist works that have tried to rebut mythicist arguments have been embarrassingly weak, no more than polemic, lacking in scholarly quality. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in Biblical Studies, where the logic of evidence points to the most compelling explanation being that Jesus Christ was a fictional myth.

A core innovation of the myth was the assertion that it all occurred just before living memory at the time of writing. Defenders of the Historical Jesus are like Flat Earthers arguing against Einstein. It is emotionally comforting to believe the whole universe revolves around our flat earth, but the belief does not withstand scrutiny. Assuming the existence of Jesus is an article of faith similar to the belief in the existence of Adam.

I was chatting with a theologian the other day, and she commented that she could not stand the traditional idea of penal substitution, that Jesus saves us from sin. My view is that the belief in the historical Jesus is an emotional comfort with epistemic foundations that are no better than the conventional ideas built upon its foundation.

Harry Marks wrote:"Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle" by Pamela Eisenbaum … does a super job of pulling together research on Paul in his cultural context, done over the last 20 years.

I too greatly enjoy reading historicist scholarship, which often contains profound insights. But unfortunately it is a bit like Newtonian mechanics, perfectly good 99% of the time for practical uses, and then falling over when considered against the remaining problems. Just as Newton's theories are inadequate for managing satellites or measuring galaxies, the historicist assumption that Jesus existed fails to explain crucial anomalies, that are all far better explained by the invention hypothesis.

The total absence of any mention of Jesus of Nazareth independent of the Gospel of Mark is one telling weakness for a person who was supposedly famous and influential. And Mark’s Gospel itself is so thoroughly magical and symbolic that considered by itself it reads far more as parable than history, a reading that Mark himself commends in a line (4:11) quoted by Matthew and Luke.

Harry Marks wrote: The cultural context of the time did not preach a mythical Resurrection, like Osiris, but a literal one. Maybe there was a later coverup

You are retrojecting later Church dogma into the early church, in exactly the same way Orwell described in his satirical argument in 1984 that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Your putative “cultural context” is as absurd as the claim of the Queen of Hearts to Alice in Wonderland that she could believe six impossible things before breakfast. It was precisely the impossibility of the physical resurrection miracle that made it so confronting for the real cultural context, enabling Christianity to construct its imaginary alternative universe where the laws of causality did not apply. Normal people rejected that Christian logic, but they were overruled, and the result was the Dark Ages, with its hostility to science and learning.

Harry Marks wrote: it is more economical, more Occam-ish, to recognize that people believed the dead were going to get out of their graves and walk around, as Matthew portrayed

No, it is not. The more parsimonious scientific explanation is that the originators of this impossible claim knew that it should be understood symbolically as a parable, but the literal story had such emotional political resonance that the original symbolic interpretation was suppressed as Gnostic Heresy.

Harry Marks wrote:the default about Jesus was that he was a living guy, crucified, who then (Paul believed) got up and walked around.

That only became the “default” after several centuries, when the Roman Emperors made any conflicting claims a capital crime, as well described at http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/theodosius.html and linked articles at http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/darkness.html

The real original default, and a far more elegant and simple reading of Paul’s epistles and of the rest of the New Testament, was that Jesus was a product of cosmic imagination of astronomer-priests. That helps to explain why Paul never said anything whatsoever that could locate Jesus anywhere specific in space or time. Paul did not locate Jesus because he did not imagine that Jesus could be located, as that idea was only invented after Paul wrote.

Harry Marks wrote: The supposedly inexplicable omission by Paul of the details of Jesus' biography makes much more sense when you recognize that he saw Jesus' death and resurrection as a "mechanism" for atonement and thus reconciliation for Gentiles, providing a substitute for the relationship that Torah created for the Jews.

And these vast inexplicable omissions make even more sense when you recognise that Paul wrote before the invention of the fictional character “Jesus of Nazareth” by Mark. Paul had numerous chances to support his argument by example from the supposed life of the great and holy founder of his religion, Jesus Christ. Your word ‘inexplicable’ well captures why Paul never cites Jesus except in the most tangential and ambiguous ways.

Harry Marks wrote: Thus, for his mission, the "other stuff" of the Gospels was not very important, and in particular the arguments that he fulfilled Messianic scriptures, important to the Synoptic Gospels, were largely irrelevant to Paul's audiences.

It is actually worth reading Carrier and Doherty on the scale of absurdity involved in such apologetic defence of Paul’s complete apparent ignorance of any historical details whatsoever about Jesus. The most plausible reason why Paul could so comprehensively ignore all those details about the life and teachings of Jesus in letters allegedly about the founder of his faith was that those details were invented after his letters were written. The Gospel of Mark put historical flesh on the cosmic bones described by Paul. Indeed, as Carrier points out, Paul’s letter to the Galatians at 1:11 explicitly rejects the idea that the Gospel of Christ could come from man.

Harry Marks wrote:All too conveniently lost, if you ask me.

From the time of the Edict of Thessalonika in 380 AD, where the Spanish fanatic Emperor Theodosius made Nicene Christianity the State Religion of the Roman Empire, profession or possession of any conflicting doctrine became a capital crime. Libraries were emptied of heretical literature, non-orthodox worship and teaching became illegal, and what you call a merely “convenient” loss accelerated the collapse of ancient civilization. Belief in the Historical Jesus is intimately entwined with the fundamentalist politics of late empire and its celebration of ignorance.

Harry Marks wrote: Maybe notions like Docetism were at the core of early Christianity, but it makes just as much sense to see them as variants that emerged as visionary individuals put their spin on the message.

No, it does not make just as much sense. If Christianity originated, as Paul’s Epistles suggest, with the belief in the descent of the celestial Jesus from heaven (eg Philippians 2:6, Colossians 1:15), then it makes much more sense to see the Historical Jesus story as the later variant that emerged and took over from the original spiritual cosmic myth.

Docetism is generally described as the heretical claim that Jesus only appeared to be incarnate. My view is that this description is a typical orthodox distortion, and that in reality the concept of Docetism was the orthodox caricature of the original mystical secret cosmic Gnostic wisdom teachings that founded Christianity by constructing the man Jesus as purely imaginary.

Then imaginary flesh gradually got added to these imaginary bones of Christ. Until, like with the magical mop in Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the Gnostic casters of the spell could no longer control it. Unfortunately, the ‘Sorcerer’ never returned to save his Gnostic apprentices, who were ruthlessly suppressed by the rampant mop-like mentality of the true believers.

Harry Marks wrote: After all, we have a wide variety of such variants, heavily featuring some with Jesus as all human with no divine nature at all, and the economical explanation is that, as with Buddhism in Asia, variants will happen.

You are accepting the false self-serving traditional time line of orthodoxy that assumes Jesus existed. That unquestioned assumption falsely portrayed Gnosticism as emerging from orthodox literalism as a corruption, whereas the evidence indicates the evolutionary causality occurred in the opposite direction. Orthodoxy was the corrupted variant that took over from a Gnostic original teaching.

The high theology of the New Testament indicates close connection to wisdom teachings, whereas the literal tradition is just a lowest common denominator, a modus vivendi, a dogma suited to the imperial demands post Constantine for political uniformity of belief as a basis for strategic unity and stability and security.

The philosophical task in matters of historical fact is to analyse the evidence to identify the most plausible lines of cause and effect. Evolution of orthodoxy out of a more complex original mystery teaching makes far more logical sense than the existence of Jesus as founder. The mystery schools had even more ancient roots in the stone age culture of knowledge as power, but their reliance on secrecy and oral transmission made them intensely vulnerable to the imperial weapons of the sword and the pen.

There are major historical anomalies in the Christ Existence Theory. The non-existence of Nazareth until a century after Jesus is one glaring anomaly, easily explained as a result of the Nazarenes existing as a secret mystery school, and so giving their name to Jesus the Nazarene. Such anomalies make the Gospel account impossible except as myth.

Harry Marks wrote:One quickly tires of arguments based on censorship.

I read a wonderful book on the history of astronomy that said the Tigris ran black with the ink of all the old books dumped into it by the Mongols at the end of the Babylonian era in 1258.
When people find an argument emotionally comforting, it is natural that they doubt anything that challenges it. The story of the loss of ancient teachings is highly complex, and combines the overt censorship mandated throughout Christendom with the simple difficulty of retaining documents over centuries, where moths and vermin destroy.

Such retention of teachings generally involves active effort, but when a text is illegal, such effort becomes difficult. That is why the Gospel of Thomas was lost except for a carefully concealed copy in the dry sands of Egypt at the outer limit of empire. No more accessible library could manage to keep a copy of this hot doc.

Harry Marks wrote: It may be that some process eliminated "the truth" from the evidence, as we have evidence of in the redaction of sources in the OT. It does seem clear that there was suppression of the Gnostic texts, but we know this because at least one community did not wish to see them eliminated from the record, and buried manuscripts at Nag Hammadi.

You are getting the logic wrong here Harry. We know there was suppression of the Gnostic texts because the Roman Emperors issued edicts that required it, and then enforced them vigorously, as did their successors.

I think it is also essential here that we distinguish Gnostic texts from Gnostic teachings. The texts date largely from the second century AD, but the teachings are much older. A magnificent recent book, The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly, explores the archaeological problem of how oral transmission of knowledge was replaced gradually by writing as a key part of the emergence of civilization, as metal-based kingdoms conquered stone age communities.

Our modern assumption tends to be that writing is key, but in historical terms writing is a recent innovation. Ancient religion was largely oral, secret and initiatory. So Gnosticism is better understood as an implicit secret cosmic wisdom tradition of initiation that used texts as public versions of hidden teachings that point to a higher concealed knowledge. The task for scholarship is to reverse engineer these lost original Gnostic teachings from their fugitive traces.

Harry Marks wrote:
while I find it plausible that Paul had a background in mystery religions that doesn't mean his main messages are just dumbed down from esoteric philosophical insights.

Elaine Pagels’ doctoral thesis on The Gnostic Paul explored how Gnostics in the second and third centuries used Paul’s distinction between Jew and Greek as code for ignorant and Gnostic. Here is my review.

There is a difference between my statement “The philosophy behind Paul got dumbed down for popular consumption”, and your version. The dumbing down occurred later, when the Gnostic origins were forgotten under Christendom.

Harry Marks wrote: Given the choice between living without love and living without affluence, I would take living without affluence... the hard-edged practicality people adopt to protect themselves against the light of mercy and caring turns easily into a carapace that makes both self and nearby others miserable.

Yes, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens, the opening line in the Sermon on the Mount. The transient happiness from wealth becomes unsustainable when it means a life without love.

Harry Marks wrote: the ultimate principle in the non-dualist perspective is not, "All is One" but "You can't close yourself off any of these issues." It's existentialism: there is no substitute for authenticity.

These themes were all central to Heidegger’s Being and Time, perhaps the greatest source book for authentic existential philosophy, despite his flaws. Although I am not aware of Heidegger explicitly discussing the Vedic phrase ‘all is one’, it appears implicitly in the opening of Being and Time, from the epigraph from Plato’s Sophist noting that 'we who thought we knew the meaning of being are now perplexed', to his celebration of Parmenides as the founder of systematic logic with his ideas on the unity of being and thinking and on the way of truth as reflecting the eternal one reality, to his analysis of how the mood of existential anxiety opens us to the authentic meaning of being as care.

Heidegger used these monist foundations to deconstruct the dualist philosophy of Descartes, arguing that care means we are with others in the world, and the dualist split between mind and matter that has characterised Western science, theology and philosophy ignores how care emerges as reason or logos, defined as the original connecting connectedness of Being.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:more careful and less speculative work … point away from the mythicist hypothesis.

Unfortunately, the historicist works that have tried to rebut mythicist arguments have been embarrassingly weak, no more than polemic, lacking in scholarly quality. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in Biblical Studies, where the logic of evidence points to the most compelling explanation being that Jesus Christ was a fictional myth.

Not really compelling. A number of researchers, in both history and Biblical Studies, have taken up the mythicist mission. In many cases they have significantly revised the orthodoxy-based version of the historiography, and that is all to the good. I generally support a variety of views being explored, for just that reason.

But I am still waiting for evidence of mythicism being predictive for an internally consistent version of the historiography that does not take absence of evidence as evidence of absence as axiomatic.

Most telling is that the mythicist version stumbles over the same problem they allege "proves" that historicism makes no sense, namely the absence of historical evidence of their putative mythicist process. What they find instead are "traces" all of which have more logical explanations, and when these traces are doubted, they claim that it is all due to the coverup by Christendom. Sorry, I am not buying. If the mythicist version is true, then looking for evidence should turn some up. I am willing to wait and see.

Robert Tulip wrote: Just as Newton's theories are inadequate for managing satellites or measuring galaxies, the historicist assumption that Jesus existed fails to explain crucial anomalies, that are all far better explained by the invention hypothesis.

They are crucial to some, but there are plenty of scholars with no investment in apologetics who don't find them persuasive.

Robert Tulip wrote:The total absence of any mention of Jesus of Nazareth independent of the Gospel of Mark is one telling weakness for a person who was supposedly famous and influential. And Mark’s Gospel itself is so thoroughly magical and symbolic that considered by itself it reads far more as parable than history,

Unfortunately the main weakness of the inventionist line of analysis is one that mythicists always seem to have trouble getting their head around: they see any use of supernatural imagery as proof that the whole thing is invention from start to finish, like Isis and Osiris or Demeter and Persephone. This despite discussion by mythicists themselves of elaboration using supernatural stories for figures as diverse as Emperor Augustus, Siddhartha Gautama, and Pythagoras. (Did you know that there are no independent attestations of the life of the Buddha? My gosh, who does that sound like? Did you know that early documents about his life attest to miracles? My gosh, who does that sound like?)

It seems that mythicists find it impossible to put themselves in an ancient mindset, before science, journalism and even, really, history, as to how stories of the supernatural were actually used.

It's most likely true that Mark is a work of theater, replete with inventions meant to make symbolic points. Again, that was a more-or-less standard approach, especially when the reference points were already taking on mythical significance. I consider it possible that the Reign of God (which is the foundation theology for the Synoptics, contrary to the apparent mythicist belief that Redemption from Sin by Jesus' death and resurrection was the foundational idea of all Christianity) as contrast with Empire was an invention of some writer like Mark, but that doesn't fit the evidence as well as simply noting that it is a plausible insight for one or more of the numerous putative Messiahs of Judaism in that age.

The idea that Mark inventing it is plausible but Jesus seeing it is not is just lacking in common sense. It is turning historiography on its head by arguing that someone we have evidence of (in the form of a document) can be real while someone a movement claims to be based on must be fictional because the supernatural claims by his followers are not evidenced in external sources.

It may be that Jesus' origin in Nazareth was an invention, although I have seen arguments that Nazareth was not "absent" before the claimed time but just absent from formal representations such as maps. Like Jesus, it was insignificant at the time.

Robert Tulip wrote:Your putative “cultural context” is as absurd as the claim of the Queen of Hearts to Alice in Wonderland that she could believe six impossible things before breakfast. It was precisely the impossibility of the physical resurrection miracle that made it so confronting for the real cultural context, enabling Christianity to construct its imaginary alternative universe where the laws of causality did not apply. Normal people rejected that Christian logic, but they were overruled, and the result was the Dark Ages, with its hostility to science and learning.

Look, it is obvious to most scholars that people believed absurd things when those absurdities reinforce the right ideas and values. They still do. Just because the cultural context includes belief in absurdities does not mean we cannot think with any clarity about how those particular beliefs come to be expressed and passed on.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:it is more economical, more Occam-ish, to recognize that people believed the dead were going to get out of their graves and walk around, as Matthew portrayed

No, it is not. The more parsimonious scientific explanation is that the originators of this impossible claim knew that it should be understood symbolically as a parable, but the literal story had such emotional political resonance that the original symbolic interpretation was suppressed as Gnostic Heresy.

My point was simply that the resurrection the Jews of the time believed in (and certainly not all of them) was not one that was symbolic alone. I am quite willing to believe there were Gnostics around who thought about it differently, but there are plenty of Jewish texts from outside Christianity which were not suppressed and which support ideas of resurrection as literal.

When you look for a perspective to be predictive, it is not enough for it to "predict" things we have already learned. That helps make it "explanatory" but not predictive. I am waiting for the first piece of evidence that mythicism predicts will be found if we go looking for such evidence.

Looking at the culture of the time has helped make sense of the evidence in ways that orthodoxy resists. So far, to my awareness at least, there are no predictive successes for historicism either (successes on the order of Schliemann's archaeological investigations for evidence of a historical basis for such "myths" as Troy and the Minotaur. [Edit to add: I later remembered that Knossos was Evans' investigation, not Schliemann's]) But based on the explanatory fit, I will put my money on historicism until either one proves out.

Robert Tulip wrote:That unquestioned assumption falsely portrayed Gnosticism as emerging from orthodox literalism as a corruption, whereas the evidence indicates the evolutionary causality occurred in the opposite direction. Orthodoxy was the corrupted variant that took over from a Gnostic original teaching.

I am afraid when I have looked at such "evidence" it always turns out to be "a better fit with the obviously superior mythicist narrative," not "facts that show the process in action." It is possible that there was a lot of influence from proto-Gnosticism on Christianity, but those influences don't give us any way of tracing an origin to myths.

Robert Tulip wrote:The high theology of the New Testament indicates close connection to wisdom teachings, whereas the literal tradition is just a lowest common denominator, a modus vivendi, a dogma suited to the imperial demands post Constantine for political uniformity of belief as a basis for strategic unity and stability and security.

The high theology of the New Testament is mostly later retrojection based on Augustine and other early fathers. Passages such as the ones you underline from Philippians and Colossians are poetical, not explanations of a process. Influence is not evidence of origin: we can see influence from Philo, but there is no evidence Philo was part of some secret Gnostic process - he was a straightforward scholar who saw ideas that were persuasive and so were likely to be taken up by others.

Robert Tulip wrote:The non-existence of Nazareth until a century after Jesus is one glaring anomaly, easily explained as a result of the Nazarenes existing as a secret mystery school, and so giving their name to Jesus the Nazarene. Such anomalies make the Gospel account impossible except as myth.

So, an example of a predictive success would be if there were a broad range of Nazarene beliefs that turned out to be present in Christianity but absent from rabbinical Judaism. I am unaware of any evidence of such a predictive success.

Robert Tulip wrote:Such retention of teachings generally involves active effort, but when a text is illegal, such effort becomes difficult.

As an aside, there is a lovely book on this subject called "The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu". I recommend it to anyone.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: It may be that some process eliminated "the truth" from the evidence, as we have evidence of in the redaction of sources in the OT. It does seem clear that there was suppression of the Gnostic texts, but we know this because at least one community did not wish to see them eliminated from the record, and buried manuscripts at Nag Hammadi.

You are getting the logic wrong here Harry. We know there was suppression of the Gnostic texts because the Roman Emperors issued edicts that required it, and then enforced them vigorously, as did their successors.

So the Imperial edicts named the Gnostic texts? I was merely claiming that we know of the texts because hidden copies were retained.
Another example of a prediction that has not been made, much less confirmed, is if such edicts of suppression included mention of documents using the notion that originally Jesus was just a myth. "But that's not how it works", I can hear mythicists saying. Eventually they will get around to spelling out how they think the historiography behind their argument from censorship actually does work. But that would be serious scholarship and all we have so far is visionary peering into the mists and some fringe historians picking up on it as a way to brand themselves.

Robert Tulip wrote:Our modern assumption tends to be that writing is key, but in historical terms writing is a recent innovation. Ancient religion was largely oral, secret and initiatory.

There is a nice piece of scholarship done by John Dominic Crossan, published in "The Birth of Christianity" about the reliability of oral transmission. It turns out to be better than we probably thought, but also to have biases like those used in linguistic research to trace connections between languages (see "The Horse, The Wheel and Language")

Harry Marks wrote:I don't think it is possible to process categories of ontology without imposing the subject/object split.

Distinguishing the thinker as subject from the object discussed is logically necessary to the existence of any thought, but does not mean dualism is fundamental. One of my favourite philosophers, Edmund Husserl, wrote a book called Ideas, in which he makes a close logical analysis of the structural relationships known as noetics, looking at how the object is present within mind.

The subject/object split is just the perceived differentiation between the self and the world, something that begins instinctively from the moment a baby cries. The relevant question for ontology is whether this apparent split produces any intrinsic difference. Traditional dualisms argue for two types of stuff, spiritual and physical. Monism, the view that all is one, holds that all apparent differences are ultimately resolved in the coherent unity of the universe. Just because it ‘seems’ from our personal perspective that mind is different from matter does not make it so.

The classic explanation is in the balance of yin and yang. Perceived dualisms of light and dark, positive and negative, male and female, active and passive, spirit and matter, etc, reflect that these polarities come together in the higher unity of tao, the way of nature. The stable one gives birth to the dynamic two and their relationship in the three.

Harry Marks wrote: Sages explaining non-dualist perspectives usually report that true enlightenment is experienced as a melting away of that split, so that the contemplative one experiences life, the universe and everything as part of the self, and not just vice-versa.

That interpretation, seeing the whole in the part, arises in Blake’s poetic vision of the universe in a grain of sand, but this is by imaginative fractal reflection, like Indra’s Net where every dew drop on the spiderweb reflects the entire universe.

The 'vice-versa' you mention is the observation that our self is part of the world, that our separate identity is better understood through part-whole analysis, as partaking of the larger identities that shape us, like water flowing in a river. But to invert that, and say the whole universe is part of my self, looks more like metaphorical poetry than serious philosophy. Even so, we are stardust, with all our heavy elements born billions of years ago in exploding stars.

Harry Marks wrote: Not having experienced this, I find I can best make sense of it with the perspective of universal consciousness, that our own consciousness is part of some larger awareness, and that we can access that awareness by having "self" be constituted not by its differences from "the outside" but by its independence from the limitations of the differentiated "small" self.

The distinctive conscious self of personal awareness is defined in psychology as the ego or I. Carl Jung held that the real self includes much of which the ego is not aware, and defined this unconscious dimension of the self as the id or it. The id participates in broader currents of identity and is influenced by symbols and emotions that form most of our self like how the submarine part of an iceberg is so much bigger than the visible portion.

Whether the self can ever be “independent” from the limits of the ego in the way envisaged in Buddhism is a difficult question. Buddhism maintains that ego is responsible for the delusional temptation and suffering of attachment, and that enlightenment comes from detachment from the illusions of the ego, seeing the deep unity between the real self and eternal truth. But how can such an enlightened self find motive for action, given the role of ego in motivation? For Christianity, the story of Jesus turning to Jerusalem involves an egoic dimension in the confrontation with evil. Christianity does not share the Buddhist sense that bliss could be achieved through escape from the world.

Harry Marks wrote: You tend to resist having words change their meaning, so I suspect a claim that self is not "what you thought self was" is inherently repugnant to you.

I don’t think I have ever implied that the concepts of “self” and “self-perceptions” have the same meaning. Perceptions are routinely wrong.

The psychology of personal identity generally recognises that people believe deluded fantasies about who they really are. Religion plays a big part in such fantasy. When people believe that a myth is a literal fact, they buy into a delusion that functions rather like the famous feet of clay in Daniel’s dream, sapping the stability and integrity of everything built upon it.

Deluded ideology generates the foundations of a false sense of reality and personal identity. Buddhism holds that this basic error (Maya) at the foundations of false perception is the cause of suffering, rippling through our whole engagement with the world.

Harry Marks wrote: Yet such propositions are essential to the Eastern tradition in which the world is illusion and enlightenment requires seeing literally everything differently.

Your term “world” covers a multitude of sins and meanings. Isaac Newton held that the ‘centre of the world’ is the fulcrum of the solar system, the barycentric point around which all mass orbits, whose location integrates all the mass of the system. At the other extreme, we find examples like the ‘worlds of hobbies’ where people construct an overtly imaginary framework of meaning.

Newton used ‘world’ to mean objective reality, and defended his view with mathematics, measurement and accurate prediction. More commonly, world refers to the inter-subjective construction of shared meaning, with myths and ideologies producing common dreams and identities in a comforting fantasy, with strong potential for illusion.

In between, we have the concept of world as planet. The recently deceased Ursula Le Guin put this nicely in her story title The Word For World Is Forest, (in German picking up the etymology Wort Welt Wald). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Word_ ... _Is_Forest

Newton’s usage illustrates that an enlightened concept of world is possible, even if he only partly achieved it. The issue comes up strongly in analysis of Gnosticism, with its critics alleging that Gnostics consider matter to be evil, where a more nuanced reading is that Gnosticism generally saw the constructed world of human illusion to be evil.

People jump/elide from 'world as construction' to 'world as description'. These are very different, reflecting the distinction between descriptive science and constructionist culture. Heidegger’s central idea of Being in the World helps to establish a monist theory of the world, defining ‘worldhood’ as the framework of meaning and care, integrating construction and description.

Harry Marks wrote:The tradition of contemplative Christianity is not so invested in notions of illusion, but its insights consistently point toward seeing "self" as inclusive of the welfare of others.

My view is that Christianity evolved from Buddhism, as Buddhist missionaries sent by Asoka from India established the western monastic tradition from the third century BC. But western culture has some deeply ingrained delusions, such as the false belief that the west is superior to the east, as well exploded by Bernal in Black Athena. The false ideas of western superiority are grounded in the traditions that put technological conquest and progress at the centre of identity, and these myths of progress have infected some western mysticism as well.

There is however a contemplative tradition within the Bible that focuses strongly on the critique of illusion, with the comments from Jesus condemning hypocrisy, arrogance and stupidity. Perhaps the way the church came to rely so heavily on the deluded beliefs of literal dogma made this line of argument about illusion a sore point, leading to the lack of emphasis that you mention.

Your theme of self as intrinsically with others is reflected in the core idea in the Bible that we should love others and God as we love our self, producing the ethic of compassionate solidarity that is the dream of the kingdom of God.

Harry Marks wrote: Why should I be interested?" The answer is, for the good, but this is not the Good of obligation, the thing we are supposed to want, but rather the harmony of all things toward which the soul inclines itself naturally, when it is seeking what makes life meaningful at all. And as long as we insist on our self being separated from that harmony, it will be.

Your phrase “the Good of obligation” seems to refer to a sense of moral duty, and to how duty in the imperial traditions is to King and Country, or to Uncle Sam in the republican traditions.

But then your contrast to ‘the harmony of all things’ raises the problem of what we mean by a duty to God. Perhaps the problem is that we tend to limit God to a tribal meaning, interpreting God in national or dogmatic terms and ignoring the deeper meaning of harmony.

The harmony of all things, which is the proper object of duty, is a complex idea for both culture and science. One way to put duty in empirical terms is to recognise how culture is nested in a physical context.

My own study of the physical context of cultural evolution looks at the very slow orbital cycles of light and dark, primarily the twenty thousand year oscillation of glaciation driven by precession that seems to inspire the old cyclic myth of golden and iron ages. Against that framework, the current traumatised state of human psychology, the inability to see any harmony, reflects our position as emerging from the wintry depth of the iron age, seeking redemption after the fall.

Interestingly, these precessional ages are driven by the perihelion date, when earth is closest to the sun.
Now on 4 January, matching the time when days begin to perceptibly lengthen, the perihelion is beginning the ten thousand year ascent to the next golden age. On that model we can expect the insistence on separation from harmony to characterise human culture for a very long time into the future.

People routinely identify productivity and dynamism with individual competition and differentiation, seeing calls for harmony as undermining the clarity of personal identity and purpose. So the idea that the harmony of all things can readily become a driving force in culture or politics looks distant.

Harry Marks wrote: you have managed to talk yourself into a viewpoint in which dualism rests on projection, so that only "false" distinctions (by the light of objective methods) count as dualism.

Yes, as I explained above in discussing the Taoist themes of Yin and Yang, any perceived duality is nested within a deeper unity, so any argument that makes a dualism fundamental, such as the split between God and the world, is intrinsically wrong.

This dualist error does involve psychological projection, with our desire for distinction between self and world projected into fundamental ontology, wrongly inferring a radical distinction between matter and spirit. A higher vision has to reconcile matter and spirit in a consistent and coherent story about the unified nature of reality.

Harry Marks wrote: While I agree that arguments from revelation for some kind of supernatural authority are specious, that does not negate revelation as a source of insight.

The concept of revelation, in Greek apocalypse, is central to insight and intuition, just in the sense that our intuition reveals information that our conscious reason finds hard to articulate clearly.

With global warming a looming apocalypse, in the sense of planetary catastrophe, the task is to explain whether this ‘revelation’ comes from coherent scientific knowledge or just from a vague hunch, and how intuitions can be clarified. I think it is important to ground opinions in scientific prediction, but generating social traction requires that the data of science be explained in a more popular framework through the language of apocalypse.

Apocalyptic language about climate change is rejected from both sides of the faith/reason divide. Traditional literal religion restricts revelation to divine magic tricks, while science finds the whole notion of intuitive prophecy difficult. A middle path between these extremes of faith and reason could be a way to generate more productive discussion.

Consider the leopard-lion-bear of Revelation 13:1. If such magical mystery Biblical tours reflect deep natural insight, there is the potential to reposition revelation to accord with rational knowledge. I will come back to this example in response to your question about how mythicism is predictive.

The traditional fundamentalist readings of such texts remind me of a line from Bullwinkle, “Hey Rocky, watch me pull a beast out of my hat!”, due to the farcical literalism that ignores symbolic meaning.

Harry Marks wrote: the fundamental problem with revelations about the supernatural is not their lack of scientific verifiability, but rather their distortion of the subject/object unity in the I/Thou encounter. As long as someone is looking for meaning "out there," in some obligation or other principle that is objectively "the real" meaning, it will not be real meaning.

I have a different line on this problem of the meaning of supernatural claims. The Memory Code argues that originally most ancient myths were part of initiatory traditions of secret knowledge, held as secret in order to protect the stability across generations. The suppression of these oral initiation traditions that go back tens of thousands of years through the stone age has caused the loss of knowledge of the real meaning of the surviving fragmentary myths.

So for example, the myth in Revelation 22 of the Tree of Life, described in the Bible as having twelve fruits, one for each month of the year, and growing on both sides of the River of Life, is allegorical symbol for visual observation of the zodiac stars. This image is a precise coded description of the night sky, where the twelve zodiac constellations are on both sides of the celestial river, the Milky Way. My reading is that the forgetting of this real simple objective meaning, with its links to the orderly stability of the visual heavens, has allowed believers to invent all sorts of supernatural meanings for such myths.

The stellar allegory is a meaning that is “out there”, in your phrase, but this meaning has been unacceptable to orthodox literalist dogma. As a result, literal church teachings have severely traumatised human psychology and culture by relying on false interpretations, producing the feet of clay and foundations in sand that today bedevil organised faith. The real origins are lost, even though as in this case they can be fairly easily reconstructed from the fugitive traces hidden in the Bible, were anyone interested.

In this example, the Tree of Life, the objective cosmic meaning is compatible with your use of Martin Buber’s I and Thou. If the Tree of Life means the zodiac, then the Bible is saying that redemption of the world involves a remembering of this forgotten ancient knowledge of connection between humanity and the cosmos. The framework of astronomy in this light becomes connection and belonging, rather than naming and observation. That is a paradigm shift.

Harry Marks wrote: the possibility of nuclear war also means we are intrinsically connected in a way we were not before, but the primacy of caring to meaning makes that connection deeper and more fundamental to a meaningful life than recognizing we are all in the same lifeboat.

In Heidegger’s analysis of care, he argued that in anxiety, using the German concept of Angst that is often translated dread, we confront Being in the World as such, and the possibility of nothingness. Concern about nuclear war certainly picks up on that anxiety as the source of care, as does worry about global warming, seeing recognition of the possibility of human extinction as the framework for authentic meaning.

Harry Marks wrote:Apocalypse just means revelation, and I have seen it with my own eyes. Not only the brown haze of Los Angeles,

Now you are being flippant. In modern usage, there is a big distinction between apocalypse as global catastrophe and revelation as finding out facts. The revelation of smog is bad for health, but it is nothing like the four horsemen of plague, war, famine and death.

Harry Marks wrote: Pittsburgh was Hell at the height of the wartime expansion: 1969. I don't have any trouble imagining the air of Delhi or Beijing today, because I saw it before the government got its act together and did something about it. That was "transformation."

Not wanting to diminish the importance of clean air, there is something far more dire about apocalyptic transformation. Elements of the prevailing paradigm of reality are on a trajectory toward extinction, and have to be identified and reversed in order to prevent catastrophe. The real apocalyptic problem of global warming is that sea level rise, mega-storms, mass extinction, acidification, drought and ocean stratification could combine to cause a repeat of the Permian Great Dying of 252 million years ago when almost all life went extinct and things had to start again. By that standard smog doesn’t rise to the horse’s shoe, let alone its bridle.

Harry Marks wrote:So what is wrong with government borrowing from its people to invest for the public good? I do not see any moral issue in government debt per se. If it isn't really for the public good, that could be a moral issue. If you owe it to others, that could be a practical issue. But the idea that there is something immoral about passing debt on to one's progeny, if the debt was used to also create something good that is also being passed on, is opaque to me. I can't see anything meaningful in it.

The question is whether government debt is being incurred for productive investment or for unproductive consumption. If debt is mainly for consumption, as appears largely the case, debt brings major risk, arising from the perverse incentive that those who benefit from the debt will not have to repay it, and the moral hazard that incurring such unproductive debt actively undermines the capacity of the economy.

Harry Marks wrote: spiritual matters are not abstract and philosophical but electric and energizing.

That sense of the electric energy in spirit is a really important observation in terms of the vitality of faith. A sense of living spiritual presence and charisma shows the intimate connection between spirit and inspiration. Any ideas that inspire are thereby spiritual, showing how the spiritual has a wider remit than religion.

Even where our spiritual concerns touch on large abstract ideas, they inspire when they produce shared sense of direction, meaning and purpose, generating traction and engagement through a perception of relevance.

Harry Marks wrote: The intellectualism of the church in the Enlightenment did serious damage to the pietism and other authentic spirituality that was abroad among the people before that. It quenched the spirit, as Paul would have said.

This problem of the role of abstract theology in religion is a big one. The easy temptation is to take religious ideas like grace, love and God as empirical claims subject to testing, but such an attitude, ignoring their spiritual comfort, does not pick up on either the psychology or the real meaning of these abstract terms.

Nietzsche suggested the effort to prove the existence of God through theology was the main cause of the death of God in culture.

Newton, as the real founder of the Enlightenment, was able to hold together the Gnostic tension between the deist clockwork God of astronomical order and the spiritual God of fervent prayer, but such talent is the product of rare genius. It is very hard to explain or replicate such Newtonian melding of heart and head. One or the other is invariably diminished, leading to incoherent and unbalanced views.

Harry Marks wrote: It is easy to see the "for others" in the Marthas, who toil away to see that the work goes forward. But those who sit at the feet of the Master need to see that it is "for others", and if they cannot deliver the insights to other seekers, they need to study harder.

This story of Martha and Mary makes me think of the debate over salvation by faith or works. The ordinary tendency is to see works of mercy as performed by Martha as the only practical help. If we think of faith as meaning ‘strategic direction’, then it becomes apparent that unless good works are placed in a coherent vision they are of no avail.

In this story from Luke, the strategic direction that Mary obtains from sitting like Isis to shoot the breeze with Jesus gives her an inspiring vision of faith that would have been missed if she joined Martha in doing the dishes instead as a work of service.

Looking at modern examples, in climate change no amount of “works” such as use of renewables will replace the “faith” involved in a strategic shift of global paradigm to remove the dangerous carbon that humans have added to the air.

The most egregious example of ‘salvation by works’ is the Marxist ‘labor theory of value’ which asserts that work has intrinsic value in itself rather than just in terms of what people are willing to pay for it.

Harry Marks wrote: given that a person like yourself, actually doing something about the climate issue, is simultaneously denying the role of markets in balancing external costs against benefits, apparently just because externalities by definition require public recognition and charging for those costs, I would say yes, we need some discussion about high concepts.

Markets work to solve normal problems, not in emergencies. The climate situation is an emergency, requiring immediate removal of dangerous carbon from the air. The pretence that market solutions could stop global warming is a bit like suggesting to the Poles in 1939 that they could stop Hitler by reforming their tax code.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:I don't think it is possible to process categories of ontology without imposing the subject/object split.

Distinguishing the thinker as subject from the object discussed is logically necessary to the existence of any thought, but does not mean dualism is fundamental.

True, but there is a more fundamental unity which needs to be present, not excluded. The issue, as I see it and will try to explain it further on, is whether "thought", i.e. logical processing, is more fundamental than "caring" or vice-versa. When thinking about the world, or for that matter about the self, is consciously in service to caring, then it does not derail caring from its job to give life meaning even if it uses risky dualistic distinctions, including between subject and object.

Robert Tulip wrote:The relevant question for ontology is whether this apparent split produces any intrinsic difference. Traditional dualisms argue for two types of stuff, spiritual and physical. Monism, the view that all is one, holds that all apparent differences are ultimately resolved in the coherent unity of the universe. Just because it ‘seems’ from our personal perspective that mind is different from matter does not make it so.

I suggest that the "ontology" of this resolution lies entirely within the experience of consciousness. The coherent unity of the universe may be proposed to exist materially, for example in the functioning of physical laws which are the same in every time and place, but this is mere symbol because it does not address the values issues raised by caring.

As a result, apparent dualisms (i.e. artificial simplicities created by misleading appearance), such as Descartes' mind/body split, are just distractions from the important dualisms like those between good and evil or clarity and muddle. The important dualisms are real, from the perspective of thought. But they are nevertheless part of a fundamental unity from the perspective of caring, and when this fundamental unity is perceived/experienced, the revolutionary perspective causes vital spiritual awakening.

Robert Tulip wrote:The classic explanation is in the balance of yin and yang. Perceived dualisms of light and dark, positive and negative, male and female, active and passive, spirit and matter, etc, reflect that these polarities come together in the higher unity of tao, the way of nature. The stable one gives birth to the dynamic two and their relationship in the three.

The taoist way of putting these things together is very helpful. But when it is rendered as objective description, rather than subjective perception (or, one might say, as "knowledge of nature" rather than "familiarity with life"), it loses critical elements of the insight. The perceiver is an essential part of the unity: it melts away if we try to render this as objective description.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: the contemplative one experiences life, the universe and everything as part of the self, and not just vice-versa.

The 'vice-versa' you mention is the observation that our self is part of the world, that our separate identity is better understood through part-whole analysis, as partaking of the larger identities that shape us, like water flowing in a river. But to invert that, and say the whole universe is part of my self, looks more like metaphorical poetry than serious philosophy.

Let me pick out for you the elements in this phrasing which presuppose the subject/object split, that is, which impose a neutrality of their truth that is somehow independent of our caring about them.

1. "the observation": think instead about the experience. The world being part of myself is just paradox if it is rendered as objective "observation", but the experience that makes it meaningful is the awareness that my self includes not only objectively verifiable "influences" from the outside but a participation-by-caring in the larger projects undertaken by others, by the common experience of finding meaning in life, and thus, by all of nature. My relationship to life and the universe is part of my caring, which is constitutive of my self.

You allude to this alternate perspective when you discuss the "larger identities" which, like water in a stream, make up part of the identity of that stream. But you fail to recognize that the stream that is my self is more fundamentally about caring, and so includes the universe not ontologically but existentially, than about distinction from other selves. This was opened to me by an exercise I have used with students. "Define yourself, as best you can, in four words." Like most people, I chose my four words to distinguish myself from others. That's the dualistic mind at work. The person who presented it to me recalled someone who had said, "to start I'd have to say I'm a human being." The flash of insight I got from that illustration is as close as I have come to directly perceiving that "All is One."

2. "better understood": note the word better. You are imposing by the ways you imply betterness that "better" understanding is measured in ways which are most objective, which are most independent of our caring about them. That's fine for description of the workings of nature, but, once again, it subtracts out the element of caring which actually defines "better" understanding.

3. "looks more like metaphorical poetry than like serious philosophy": perfectly captures the mistaken dualism of the mind's analytical blindness. "Serious philosophy" is taken to impose the objective independence from caring, rather than engaging with life as it is lived. As if the perfect ontology would somehow perfectly exclude caring. Bollocks, as the Brits say. By contrast, metaphorical poetry engages caring directly, to find the music in the many and varied elements of caring.

We say that a con-man can play on someone's emotions like a violin. But a real Bodhisattva helps a person orchestrate their caring in such a way that their own individual process of caring is in harmony with the give-and-take process that the universe offers to them. To put the matter a different way, accuracy matters because of the reasons we care about accuracy, not because it has some divine status of imperialistic rule over our lives. Our caring is fundamental to accuracy's mattering. Or anything else's mattering: there is no objective mattering.

SILENCE MY SOUL

Silence my soul, these trees are prayers.
I asked the tree, “Tell me about God”;
then it blossomed.

- Rabindranath Tagore

End of part I.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: we can access that [larger] awareness by having "self" be constituted not by its differences from "the outside" but by its independence from the limitations of the differentiated "small" self.

The distinctive conscious self of personal awareness is defined in psychology as the ego or I. Carl Jung held that the real self includes much of which the ego is not aware, and defined this unconscious dimension of the self as the id or it. The id participates in broader currents of identity and is influenced by symbols and emotions that form most of our self like how the submarine part of an iceberg is so much bigger than the visible portion.

Whether the self can ever be “independent” from the limits of the ego in the way envisaged in Buddhism is a difficult question. Buddhism maintains that ego is responsible for the delusional temptation and suffering of attachment, and that enlightenment comes from detachment from the illusions of the ego, seeing the deep unity between the real self and eternal truth.

I think it may be difficult in practice, but I don't think it is difficult in theory at all. If our ego, or consciously aware thinking mind, is constituted by objectivity, that is if it is committed as a matter of self-protection to the illusion that mattering is objective, then it will suffer by attachment. The ego co-opts some parts of the id to resist impulses which undermine its stranglehold on the type of awareness that is admissible. Those are "the limitations of the ego." Fundamentally, they rely on repression.

Robert Tulip wrote:But how can such an enlightened self find motive for action, given the role of ego in motivation?

Ego is free to find reasons, but if it goes about this in a way that represses our identity in common with the larger "water" of motivation, then it becomes a barrier to enlightenment. Hindu thought is often seen in the West as denying motive for action, and it has at times imposed a quietism or detachment which resisted the ego's restless search for new and better ways. Better is to embrace the search but be humble about the "betterness". After all, science is very useful, and may already have set in motion extinction of the human race by outpacing our ability to harmonize motivations. In my experience, people who cannot find any humility to have about their regard for science are in the grip of attachment, usually subconscious and mythological.

Robert Tulip wrote:For Christianity, the story of Jesus turning to Jerusalem involves an egoic dimension in the confrontation with evil. Christianity does not share the Buddhist sense that bliss could be achieved through escape from the world.

One does not escape from the world, one escapes from illusion-based attachment to the world. If you cannot see that escape as fundamental to kenosis, to the turning to Jerusalem, then you have missed the main points in non-dualism.

Robert Tulip wrote:People jump/elide from 'world as construction' to 'world as description'. These are very different, reflecting the distinction between descriptive science and constructionist culture. Heidegger’s central idea of Being in the World helps to establish a monist theory of the world, defining ‘worldhood’ as the framework of meaning and care, integrating construction and description.

As I am struggling to elucidate these concepts in this dialogue, I find repeatedly that I am "recognizing" matters whose relationship is outside me, rather than "creating" insights or relationships that don't exist without my perception of them. The line between description as process and construction as process is at least fractally intricate, if not altogether illusory.

Though I haven't read much Heidegger, I worry that his project was undertaken from an "objectivity" framework which proposed to submit existential process to the demands of ontology. If so, then it was built on sand. In my experience the dialogue between construction and description is fundamental to life. Letting the process demands of either one of them define the terms of engagement for the relationship is a mistake.

Robert Tulip wrote:Your theme of self as intrinsically with others is reflected in the core idea in the Bible that we should love others and God as we love our self, producing the ethic of compassionate solidarity that is the dream of the kingdom of God.

That's helpful. As an insight, or guideline, it can trigger recognition of the artificiality of my individual self, and thus invite the pouring in of actual compassion that is needed by so many withered, stunted lives.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:Why should I be interested?" The answer is, for the good, but this is not the Good of obligation, the thing we are supposed to want, but rather the harmony of all things toward which the soul inclines itself naturally, when it is seeking what makes life meaningful at all. And as long as we insist on our self being separated from that harmony, it will be.

Your phrase “the Good of obligation” seems to refer to a sense of moral duty, and to how duty in the imperial traditions is to King and Country, or to Uncle Sam in the republican traditions.

But then your contrast to ‘the harmony of all things’ raises the problem of what we mean by a duty to God. Perhaps the problem is that we tend to limit God to a tribal meaning, interpreting God in national or dogmatic terms and ignoring the deeper meaning of harmony.

Our duty to God, our "absolute relation to the absolute" in Kierkegaard's terminology, is not a duty per se because it comes in the context of grace. That is, it is not created by obligation, but rather is offered as a possibility (a "free gift") by the relationship at the heart of meaning.

To seek the good, to find harmony in all things meaningful, is to defeat death and the perception of isolation of the individual from others. Objectively we die, and objectively nothing we do matters except as people find it meaningful, but when our sense of meaning is drawn from the eternal, our lives (not just our thought constructions, but the meanings which actually motivate us) are able to transcend these limitations imposed by an objective frame of reference. But if we seek objective validation for our meaning, we impose these limitations and we crash into them and find ourselves sitting on the ground shaking our head with confusion.

Yes, the tribal God of nation or religion (speaking of the sociological entities), will cripple our ability to respond to longing for the harmony of all things. Tillich talked about false gods, about ultimate concerns which were not truly ultimate (in that they could not acknowledge the larger quest for shalom, in my reading). As such they are like a king who will not stand up in the presence of the King of Kings, but of course such an image must never be made into a duty. It is an opportunity. A king can be more than Caligula, and a life can have more meaning in it than flopping back and forth in response to pleasure and pain.

Robert Tulip wrote:The harmony of all things, which is the proper object of duty, is a complex idea for both culture and science. One way to put duty in empirical terms is to recognise how culture is nested in a physical context.

I would agree that fighting climate change is a duty, and that's one reason why I agree with you that subtracting carbon is at least as important (because we have delayed too long) as reducing carbon emissions. But I don't agree that it is the best way to look at either the quest for the good, or our relationship to the physical requirements of our culture.

Duty is a partial, fragmented part of the life of faith. A person of faithfulness will shudder at the possibility that they have failed in meeting a duty. In traditional, supernaturally-explained religion, our duty to God represents to us the opportunity to participate in eternity by working for shalom, which is the harmony of all things. When face-to-face with duty, our obligation to it is inescapable.

Grace doesn't remove the obligation, but it does put it in context of a relationship of love: the Absolute reaches out to us (in an actual, not metaphorical, process) to reassure us that our obligations come to us in the context of the love that humanity and the good have for us, holding out to us the possibility of living in proper quest for shalom rather than feeling we must retreat to our bank accounts and our ethnic identities as if these will save us from the great and terrible Day of Reckoning.

Robert Tulip wrote:People routinely identify productivity and dynamism with individual competition and differentiation, seeing calls for harmony as undermining the clarity of personal identity and purpose. So the idea that the harmony of all things can readily become a driving force in culture or politics looks distant.

Well, it already is a driving force in politics and culture. Like the leaven hidden in the meal. But it is far from the only driving force, and, let's face it, it is not a force that works by demanding to hold the reigns or to have a seat at the table of power, though these may at times be ceded to it.

I am quite convinced that productivity and dynamism have seen their better days. Anyone who thinks that introducing self-driving cars will increase shalom in society is barking mad. The entrepreneurial class sees individual (or corporate) competition for money as the ultimate source of all benefit in society, but I am sorry to say we must drop the curtain on them. They are now a distant third to social processes of empowering the excluded and integrating the costs of externalities into monetary incentives. That's not to say I am in favor of disempowering competition and enterprise. But the movement for selling governmental power to the donor class has to stop. It has gone too far already.

Robert Tulip wrote: A higher vision has to reconcile matter and spirit in a consistent and coherent story about the unified nature of reality.

Yes and no. If you are going to insist on the requirements of objective analysis as non-negotiable requirements of the formation of the story, then you have sabotaged the possibilities for caring to bring the elements in harmony. The "unified nature of reality" is not "objective" when it comes to reconciling spirit and matter, or many of the other supposed dualities-from-illusion which you identified.

Robert Tulip wrote:With global warming a looming apocalypse, in the sense of planetary catastrophe, the task is to explain whether this ‘revelation’ comes from coherent scientific knowledge or just from a vague hunch, and how intuitions can be clarified. I think it is important to ground opinions in scientific prediction, but generating social traction requires that the data of science be explained in a more popular framework through the language of apocalypse.

Might work. One problem I see is that apocalypse, in the form of planetary catastrophe, implies some all-at-once disaster. Climate change is a creeping, glacial-paced process and people are very subject to the boiling frog illusion. We have already had a year from Hell in the climate, and the last few years were not that much better even if you restrict yourself to U.S. climate costs. The handwriting is on the wall, but you seem to put your faith in stories of human extinction which are both harder to verify and much less tangible than Hurricanes Harvey, Katrina, Irma, Maria and Sandy.

Robert Tulip wrote: Now you are being flippant. In modern usage, there is a big distinction between apocalypse as global catastrophe and revelation as finding out facts. The revelation of smog is bad for health, but it is nothing like the four horsemen of plague, war, famine and death.

Flippancy is not part of my approach here. Was it facts we found out about? Or was it the collapse of a false narrative, that market incentives are all we need for prosperity and a good life? It seems to me you are in denial about externalities, yet if anything was revealed in facing apocalypse, it was that they need to be addressed collectively.

I am not in denial about modern usage. I would not, to a more general audience, rely on the original meaning of the word to make a claim that we faced a global catastrophe on the order of planetary extinction episodes. Yet I am corresponding with a sensible, educated and philosophically trained individual who cannot see the main lesson of the previous round of environmental confrontation, much less see how bad things would be if we had not addressed that lesson. As a result I am agog (and not above seeming flippant to draw attention to this problem).

Robert Tulip wrote:That sense of the electric energy in spirit is a really important observation in terms of the vitality of faith. A sense of living spiritual presence and charisma shows the intimate connection between spirit and inspiration. Any ideas that inspire are thereby spiritual, showing how the spiritual has a wider remit than religion.

Even where our spiritual concerns touch on large abstract ideas, they inspire when they produce shared sense of direction, meaning and purpose, generating traction and engagement through a perception of relevance.

I could not have expressed this better myself.

Robert Tulip wrote:Nietzsche suggested the effort to prove the existence of God through theology was the main cause of the death of God in culture.

I was not aware of this. It should be more widely known.

Robert Tulip wrote: The ordinary tendency is to see works of mercy as performed by Martha as the only practical help. If we think of faith as meaning ‘strategic direction’, then it becomes apparent that unless good works are placed in a coherent vision they are of no avail.

I would agree, but I would add the proviso that the "coherent vision" of Christianity recognizes that any good work is done for Christ, and that the coherent strategic vision sees such works operating like the mustard seed, starting small but generating wider and more empowering flows of compassion. "Faith" in NT usage should be seen as "trust" and "faithfulness" and as such, does not really function as a coherent strategic vision.

Robert Tulip wrote:The most egregious example of ‘salvation by works’ is the Marxist ‘labor theory of value’ which asserts that work has intrinsic value in itself rather than just in terms of what people are willing to pay for it.

I like that comparison, but I also would point out that Marx got it from David Ricardo, who was seeing what was, at the time, a plausible version of equilibrium analysis. Value, to Ricardo, would tend to match labor content because labor content was the main element of cost.

Robert Tulip wrote:Markets work to solve normal problems, not in emergencies. The climate situation is an emergency, requiring immediate removal of dangerous carbon from the air. The pretence that market solutions could stop global warming is a bit like suggesting to the Poles in 1939 that they could stop Hitler by reforming their tax code.

OMG you must be kidding me. The triumph of markets over central planning was a gradual, long-haul response to incentives. That is the kind of thorough-going, comprehensive response we need to GHG's. Even if all your favorite notions of the effect of sea-life cultivation were to prove out, the Malthusian process of unregulated GHG production is still capable of overwhelming that removal.

I grant you that humanity faces an emergency, and even that it may take more than just government action to create market-like incentives against GHG emissions, but refusing to use both approaches (private innovation and incentives against external costs) is almost as foolish as refusing to use either one.

Harry Marks wrote:researchers, in both history and Biblical Studies, have taken up the mythicist mission. In many cases they have significantly revised the orthodoxy-based version of the historiography, and that is all to the good. I generally support a variety of views being explored, for just that reason. But I am still waiting for evidence of mythicism being predictive for an internally consistent version of the historiography that does not take absence of evidence as evidence of absence as axiomatic.

That is all fair comment. A paradigm does not shift until a better paradigm is presented. That has not yet happened with the debate on the existence of Jesus Christ, which is still largely confined to wailing in the outer darkness of the internet and books rather than being the subject of serious discussion in media, politics and universities.

The focus of mythicist literature that I have read has been more on teeth-gnashing about why the traditional views of Christ are wrong, rather than on presenting a more plausible alternative explanation of the evolution of faith.

My own ambition is to present such a plausible alternative, but a problem is that the scale of transformation involved for the prevailing sense of history is so big. For example, I see astrology as central to the ancient construction of the myth of Christ, through the astronomy of precession of the equinoxes. Unfortunately, that framework of zodiac ages involves a cosmology that faces severe prejudice from all sides, from both faith based and reason based worldviews. I am just now finalising a journal article on precession as the structure of time in which I present my views on the foundations of this new paradigm.

Harry Marks wrote: Most telling is that the mythicist version stumbles over the same problem they allege "proves" that historicism makes no sense, namely the absence of historical evidence of their putative mythicist process.

That is a rather complex argument that I fear misses the point of the debate on the existence of Jesus. The real problem of “absence of historical evidence” is that all the alleged evidence for the historical Jesus Christ can be directly traced to the Gospel of Mark, a highly dubious source with clear agenda and interest in invention.

None of the alleged evidence for Jesus is independent of that single source in Mark. The pervasive aggression of the subsequent assumption that Jesus was real crushed any oxygen out of the prior view that Jesus was invented. Two thousand years is plenty of time for such a pervasive assumption to wipe out most traces of other views, especially when those views are condemned as heresy and blasphemy.

As to the evidence for a mythicist process, again I refer to The Memory Code, to its anthropological analysis of how ancient oral culture universally used myth to generate and sustain complex allegorical secret frameworks of meaning, using knowledge as power. That appears the exact process that the New Testament says applies to the claim attributed by the Gospels to Jesus that his secret teachings are reserved for initiates while everything for the public is parable.

Harry Marks wrote: What they find instead are "traces" all of which have more logical explanations, and when these traces are doubted, they claim that it is all due to the coverup by Christendom. Sorry, I am not buying.

The concept of “traces” is one that I have introduced as a method to find evidence of a concealed Gnostic cosmology in the miraculous language of the New Testament, but I don't think it is much discussed in atheist mythicist literature. There is no way miracles have better explanations than pointing to secret concealed meaning, since the traditional explanation tends to be that they prove God intervened in the world in contravention of the laws of physics.

Harry Marks wrote: If the mythicist version is true, then looking for evidence should turn some up. I am willing to wait and see.

My version of the mythicist hypothesis, which is not shared across the atheist community except for Frank Zindler and the late Dorothy Murdock (Acharya S) as far as I know, is that the cosmic model of the shift of Zodiac Ages from Aries to Pisces was the primary framework for construction of the Christ Myth. This model suggests we should find traces of that framework. These are in fact abundant, in the alpha/omega model of time, the loaves and fishes miracle, the chi rho cross and all the precessional imagery in the Apocalypse.

Harry Marks wrote: Unfortunately the main weakness of the inventionist line of analysis is one that mythicists always seem to have trouble getting their head around: they see any use of supernatural imagery as proof that the whole thing is invention from start to finish, like Isis and Osiris or Demeter and Persephone.

No, you are creating a straw man. The existence of legends around Jesus is not at all seen as proof that he was invented. The invention hypothesis combines the fabulous miracles together with a series of other factors to indicate that Jesus was invented, notably around how someone called "Anointed Saviour" could possibly found a world religion while leaving no trace except through a short book, the Gospel of Mark, written at least two generations later.

Paraphrasing Voltaire, if Jesus did not exist it would have been necessary to invent him, given the messianic expectation and the political/religious context of the advent of the common era.

Harry Marks wrote:It seems that mythicists find it impossible to put themselves in an ancient mindset, before science, journalism and even, really, history, as to how stories of the supernatural were actually used.

That mindset criticism applies more strongly to believers, who reject and ignore the framework of syncretic pagan astrology that provided the enabling environment to construct the Christ Myth, for example in Alexandria. The contested comment from the early second century Roman Emperor Hadrian that Christians are astrological worshippers of Serapis certainly reinforces that hypothesis of a quite different mindset in the early church from the way it was presented in Church propaganda. The link on Serapis is worth reading to see the allegorical nature of ancient religion.

Harry Marks wrote: It's most likely true that Mark is a work of theater, replete with inventions meant to make symbolic points. Again, that was a more-or-less standard approach, especially when the reference points were already taking on mythical significance.

The only change I would suggest is that the reference points started with mythical significance, and the historical claims were added in. Acharya S in The Christ Conspiracy proves quite well that the concept of Christ was mythical from the start, given its broad use in the Old Testament to mean anointed. She wrote “A Handy Concordance of the Septuagint (261)lists some 43 scriptures that include the word christos: Lev. 4:5, 16, 6:22, 21:10, 12; 1 Sam. 2:10, 35, 12: 3, 5, 16:6, 25:7, 7, 11, 26:9, 11, 16, 23; 2 Sam. 1:14, 16, 2:5-A, 19:21, 22:51, 23:1, 3a; 1 Chr. 16:22; 2 Chr. 6:42-B, 22:7; Pss. 2:2, 17:51, 19:7, 27:8, 83:10, 88:39, 52, 104:15, 131:10, 17; Isa. 45:1; Lam. 4:20; Ezek. 16:4+A; Dan. 9:25; Amos 4:13; Hab. 3:13. Amos 4:13 τὸν χριστὸν is translated as “his thought” while the Septuagint rendered the Hebrew word as christos. The scripture, then, could read that the Lord “declares to man what is his Christ…”

This illustrates how the abstract concept of Christ Jesus, which literally means “Anointed Saviour” emerged from Old Testament requirements.

Harry Marks wrote: I consider it possible that the Reign of God (which is the foundation theology for the Synoptics, contrary to the apparent mythicist belief that Redemption from Sin by Jesus' death and resurrection was the foundational idea of all Christianity) as contrast with Empire was an invention of some writer like Mark, but that doesn't fit the evidence as well as simply noting that it is a plausible insight for one or more of the numerous putative Messiahs of Judaism in that age.

This contrast you paint between theologies of reign and redemption looks overly subtle, and doubtful. It is more important within faith than in scholarship, contrasting the messianic idea that we should emulate the way of the cross with the conventional Christendom dogma of salvation through belief. Atheist critics of Christianity have mocked the penal substitution idea of washed in the blood of the Lamb that is at the foundation of redemptionist theology. This critique is now widely accepted among liberal Christians, who find the magical ideas of Jesus dying as a ransom for sinners hard to engage with and prefer the idea that Jesus is the model of perfection.

Harry Marks wrote: It is turning historiography on its head by arguing that someone we have evidence of (in the form of a document) can be real while someone a movement claims to be based on must be fictional because the supernatural claims by his followers are not evidenced in external sources.

I have not seen any mythicist argument to the effect that the supernatural claims prove Jesus was invented. Supernatural beliefs are completely compatible with the idea, known as evemerism, that they were added to a historical story. Mythicism rejects that addition theory, and argues the Jesus story is myth historicised, not history mythified.

Harry Marks wrote: It may be that Jesus' origin in Nazareth was an invention, although I have seen arguments that Nazareth was not "absent" before the claimed time but just absent from formal representations such as maps. Like Jesus, it was insignificant at the time.

René Salm, author of http://www.nazarethmyth.info/ is the best scholar I have read on Nazareth. He points out that the existence of tombs in the locations that are believed to be the old town is incompatible with the existence of a town at the claimed time of Jesus, since Jews did not have tombs in towns. There are many such anomalies. Consider the absence of Nazareth from the works of Josephus and the Talmud in their lists of the towns of Galilee, the anomaly in Luke regarding the Nazareth synagogue which is plainly invention, and the statement of Origen about not knowing where Nazareth was despite living in walking distance from its alleged location.

It is a far more elegant and simple hypothesis that Mark or more probably Matthew invented the town of Nazareth to provide plausible deniability to the charge that Christians were just members of a proscribed Gnostic sect, the Nazarenes or Nazirites, whose secret identity goes back to the ‘Watcher’ traditions of Enoch, Samuel, Samson, Isaiah and John. Once again Kenneth Humphries provides a concise summary of the problem – see http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/nazareth.html

Harry Marks wrote: people believed absurd things when those absurdities reinforce the right ideas and values. They still do. Just because the cultural context includes belief in absurdities does not mean we cannot think with any clarity about how those particular beliefs come to be expressed and passed on.

The greatest absurdity ever told was that God became incarnate in the man Jesus Christ of Nazareth in Galilee. This was such a comforting and useful claim, resting on the messianic hopes of centuries and reinforcing the idea that Rome lacked political legitimacy, that the hope gave birth to the belief. Psychology and politics combined in a perfect storm to enable literalism to sweep all before it.

Harry Marks wrote: there are plenty of Jewish texts from outside Christianity which were not suppressed and which support ideas of resurrection as literal.

The starting point for philosophical analysis of such religious claims is that resurrection is impossible, and therefore that any beliefs that it is possible are deluded or deceptive. Again, the framework of The Memory Code well explains resurrection as parable for the seasons, with the death and rebirth of the saviour standing as initiatic symbol for the death and rebirth of the sun, combining the annual turning point of light at Christmas and the turning point of life at Easter.

Harry Marks wrote: When you look for a perspective to be predictive, it is not enough for it to "predict" things we have already learned. That helps make it "explanatory" but not predictive. I am waiting for the first piece of evidence that mythicism predicts will be found if we go looking for such evidence.

As I promised before, let me return to the beast of the apocalypse. My prediction in reading this arcane myth was that it would prove to be a coded symbol for precession of the equinox. And indeed it is very simple. The North Celestial Pole moved in about 1000 BC out of the constellation of the dragon and into the constellation of the bear, next to the lion and leopard. The North Celestial Pole is the ‘lodestar’ about which the entire heavens rotate, the stable point of power, order and divine authority, the symbolic mercy seat of the heavenly father.
How does the Bible encode this core vision of divine presence in the cosmos? Rev 13:2 http://biblehub.com/interlinear/revelation/13-2.htm says the beast was like a leopard, a bear and a lion... And to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority. My opinion is that the only coherent meaning of this image is a description of the movement of the North Celestial Pole, the seat of divine power, throne and authority, from its position in the dragon to its current place in the bear, between the lion and leopard. However, I recognise this is a view that most people find hard to grasp or agree with, even though I personally think it should be obvious. I had quite a long and frustrating discussion on the Biblical encoding of the North Celestial Pole at the Early Writings Forum, http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... ?f=3&t=501 some years ago. My opinion that this is a clear matter helped get me banned from that site, which I thought was very unfair and wrong on their part as I am only advancing a scientific hypothesis and am not saying anything magical or absurd. It just shows how emotional people can get about religion. I am simply saying that astronomy was far more central to ancient religion than is generally understood, and that my hypothesis that Jesus Christ was invented to personify the shift of zodiac ages coheres with all the evidence and helps to explain ancient cosmology.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/pf/pf27.htm provides some further information on the centrality of the North Celestial Pole to world mythology.

Harry Marks wrote: Looking at the culture of the time has helped make sense of the evidence in ways that orthodoxy resists. So far, to my awareness at least, there are no predictive successes for historicism either (successes on the order of Schliemann's archaeological investigations for evidence of a historical basis for such "myths" as Troy and the Minotaur.) But based on the explanatory fit, I will put my money on historicism until either one proves out.

Finkelman in The Bible Unearthed notes that some Israeli archaeological sites have been found from Biblical references, but the usual tendency is more the reverse, as with the complete absence of evidence for Moses in Sinai. Nazareth should be the most controversial, as archaeology indicates the entire Gospel use of it is fiction.

Harry Marks wrote: such "evidence" always turns out to be "a better fit with the obviously superior mythicist narrative," not "facts that show the process in action." It is possible that there was a lot of influence from proto-Gnosticism on Christianity, but those influences don't give us any way of tracing an origin to myths.

That is a good way to frame the problem that mythicism has focused more on why Christianity is absurd than on providing a superior realistic account of who invented Jesus and why. Perhaps that is because most mythicist narrative is overtly hostile to religion, arguing that the evidence of ancient fraud should encourage abandonment of faith, and they are worried that focus on how Christianity was actually invented will help the reform of faith. The problem is that the mainstream story is absurd, but there was such comprehensive and deliberate loss of information that working out what actually happened is impossible, so we are left with balance of probabilities and piecing together traces.
I take the view that what you call “proto-Gnosticism” was actually the central factor in writing the New Testament, and that reconstructing ‘proto-Gnosticism’ is the decisive task in putting faith on sound epistemic foundations, like Q for a new age. This precursor movement must have had very ancient roots in oral culture, manifesting in the secret initiation societies known as the mysteries, and in the range of ancient religions such as those of Mithras, Serapis, Eleusis, etc that were stamped out by Christianity.
This hypothesised precursor religious movement that wrote the blueprint for Jesus would have been heavily influenced by Platonic philosophy, with ideas about the rule of the good and the centrality of logos strongly shaping Christianity. Following the Hellenistic conquests, there was a broad migration of Greeks around the Eastern Mediterranean. Euclid of Alexandria, the great Greco-Egyptian geometer, was a typical example. The Greeks first invented Serapis to mix their Gods with those of Egypt, and it appears entirely reasonable on this basis that the Greek philosophers then worked with locals to overlay Jewish and Babylonian myths on Serapis to construct the Gospel story of Jesus Christ.

Harry Marks wrote:The high theology of the New Testament is mostly later retrojection based on Augustine and other early fathers.

I disagree. There is plenty of theology in the Bible. The later ideas such as the trinity and original sin involved effort to reconcile the Gospels with Roman politics, and are therefore less coherent than the Gospels, even while they are more abstract.

Harry Marks wrote: Passages such as the ones you underline from Philippians and Colossians are poetical, not explanations of a process.

The point of those passages is that Christ descended from heaven, and was pre-existent with God, along the lines of Amos 4:13 where Christ is implicitly defined as the mind of God. https://www.biblestudytools.com/paralle ... lxx&t2=niv
That model of Christ as divine reason is completely compatible with precessional cosmology, seeing Christ as the visible rationality of the cosmos, revealing the eternal laws of God the Father as stable orderly patterns, seen especially in the shift of the spring point into a new Zodiac Age in 21 AD.

Harry Marks wrote: Influence is not evidence of origin: we can see influence from Philo, but there is no evidence Philo was part of some secret Gnostic process - he was a straightforward scholar who saw ideas that were persuasive and so were likely to be taken up by others.

I have only read a small amount of and about Philo, such as his description of the Therapeuts of Alexandria, and some of his specifically astral information about Judaism. These Therapeuts he describes appear to be Buddhist missionaries bringing monasticism from India to the West, but I have not found any books that discuss this interesting supposition in detail other than Christ in Egypt by DM Murdock. The evidence you mention of a ‘secret Gnostic process’ is can be gleaned primarily from the New Testament itself, which reads as the parabolic tip of an iceberg of ancient Gnostic culture.

Harry Marks wrote:an example of a predictive success would be if there were a broad range of Nazarene beliefs that turned out to be present in Christianity but absent from rabbinical Judaism. I am unaware of any evidence of such a predictive success.

Little is known of the Nazarenes. Not even if they were the same as the Nazirites, or if they influenced the “Netser” theology from Isa 11:1 which came to interpret Jesus of Nazareth as the ‘weneser yisay’ or branch of Jesse. The link above http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/nazareth.html has a good summary.

Harry Marks wrote:So the Imperial edicts named the Gnostic texts? I was merely claiming that we know of the texts because hidden copies were retained.

Many of the Gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi cache were known by title, or because heresiologists had quoted them. I wrote an essay on the Gnostic Peratae just based on the fragments quoted by Hippolytus, for example looking at their discussion of the North Celestial Pole and snake imagery. There are numerous ancient texts which survive only in fragmentary quotations from their opponents.

Harry Marks wrote: Another example of a prediction that has not been made, much less confirmed, is if such edicts of suppression included mention of documents using the notion that originally Jesus was just a myth.

There is quite a good Wikipedia page on Docetism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docetism It discusses the controversy about whether the Docetic heresy actively claimed that Christ was a myth, and notes that the Epistles of John explicitly sought to suppress the idea that Jesus may not have come in the flesh. 1 John 4 states “This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.” This Bible text explicitly discusses those who reject the claim that Jesus existed as a human being, condemning them as “the antichrist”, and goes on to pose the clash as between God and the world, with believers accepting Jesus existed and “the world” rejecting this claim.

Harry Marks wrote:"But that's not how it works", I can hear mythicists saying. Eventually they will get around to spelling out how they think the historiography behind their argument from censorship actually does work. But that would be serious scholarship and all we have so far is visionary peering into the mists and some fringe historians picking up on it as a way to brand themselves.

Such mockery reads more as evangelism than scholarship. The only reason Christ Myth Theory remains on the “fringe” is because of the social fatwa against it invigilated by the church. Carrier’s On The Historicity of Jesus is a work of serious historical scholarship that is serving to shift the whole paradigm. Comments like your false inference of mercenary motives are based only on prejudice from tangential reading, and serve to warn others off this whole topic, which is actually central to the problem of mass delusion in human psychology and history.

Harry Marks wrote: There is a nice piece of scholarship done by John Dominic Crossan, published in "The Birth of Christianity" about the reliability of oral transmission. It turns out to be better than we probably thought, but also to have biases like those used in linguistic research to trace connections between languages (see "The Horse, The Wheel and Language")

I have that book but have not read it. Crossan is an interesting figure as a leftist theologian who fully believes in the existence of Jesus. Most Christian discussion of oral history is just about how the purported group around Jesus transmitted their ideas to the gospel authors, but that entirely assumes that Jesus existed, begging the question of the relevance of the more complex anthropology of oral transmission as secret initiation. The Memory Code looks at oral transmission in a much more comprehensive way, how over tens of thousands of years non-literate stone age people retained all their knowledge orally, and then how this oral knowledge power gradually broke down under the civilising assault of swords, pens and ploughs.